BestGoShoeless

8 July

The "IQ test" story broke SIX YEARS AGO. "the first few questions are easy, but I'll bet you couldn't even answer the last five questions ... they get very hard, the last five questions." The last six questions: DO YOU KNOW WHAT DAY IT IS (Year, Month, Date, Day) and WHERE ARE YOU (place, city).

BestGoShoeless reposted

Jeff

@gojeffgo.com

14 Oct 2023

Maybe stop bitching about your own little problems for a second and help me find out where my wife hid the goddamn Halloween candy.

12h

I remember the first time I had to wear a tie. I was 12. A thoroughly disinterested uncle explained where the tie should end. I never wore another tie for 5 years; still remembered the lesson. This guy wears a suit nearly every day of his life and he still has no clue how to dress himself.

Julian Sanchez@normative.bsky.social

It is genuinely weird that Trump has spent his whole life surrounded by extraordinary wealth and still has the absolute trashiest, tackiest taste imaginable.

BestGoShoeless reposted

George Takei

@georgetakei.bsky.social

20h

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

22h

Ask these guys about literally any progressive policy and they are an expert on every subject. Ask them an obvious economics question like "Are rich guys getting richer?" and well golly, I'll just have to get back to you on that one.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

BERMAN: Who's making a 'freakin fortune' as Trump put it with high oil and gas prices? REP. PETE SESSIONS: You know, I'm not really sure, John

Need a concrete indicator of how boned we are? Call it the Cheesecake Factory index. Twice this week, Trump bluescreened. Musk finally admitted to interfering in Ukrainian defenses. The FBI/DOJ began to make overt election interference moves. But Obama made a joke; this is what's important now.

adonis (and cait)@cait.bsky.social

what's killing me about the cheesecake factory discourse is that Obama didn't even say the cheesecake is bad, he said it looks crazy in there and it does. even if you like the food, it does in fact look fucking crazy in there

<WKRP Voice> God as my witness, I thought the Obsession Fortnite skin was a meme. I didn't know it was actually real. <claps hands in Little League coach> Good game, y'all. Good hustle. We're done here. Pack it up. The grand experiment of human civilization is done.

Social media brings out the worst in humanity, episode 1,127: "It's just a prank, bro" douchebag content is so established as a form of clickbait that it has spawned another layer of clickbait. There are now channels thriving by generating fake videos of pranksters getting knocked unconscious.

This is genuinely a point that I have trouble figuring out about the MAGA phenomenon: How does a movement that is deeply motivated by anger show no signs of angry backlash? Take a walk with me:

rosie1972.bsky.social@rosie1972.bsky.social

If you were ready to be disowned by your family, and festoon your house and car with Trump merch, then discovered beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was wall-to-wall flim flam, why aren't you on the same warpath against him that you were when you were taking his marching orders?

It's one of the most common replies that I make on social media, and it usually ends the thread: Why aren't you angry at the people who clearly thought you were too stupid to figure out this obvious lie? If it were me, I'd be pissed.

This is genuinely a point that I have trouble figuring out about the MAGA phenomenon: How does a movement that is deeply motivated by anger show no signs of angry backlash? Take a walk with me:

rosie1972.bsky.social@rosie1972.bsky.social

If you believe it's real, where's the crusade to find the case (or cases) in which it happened? Once it's made clear to you that the story is an absolute fairy tale, where's your anger at the liar who cheerfully sold it to you?

Yes, yes, yes, I know that the cognitive dissonance and "he's an asshole, but he's on my side" explains a lot of it. My point is that it can't explain ALL of it. There have got to be folks who heard one of these many obvious and verifiable lies and finally saw through the scam. Why aren't they mad?

This is genuinely a point that I have trouble figuring out about the MAGA phenomenon: How does a movement that is deeply motivated by anger show no signs of angry backlash? Take a walk with me:

rosie1972.bsky.social@rosie1972.bsky.social

If you are righteously outraged about kids being taught to be furries in school (the litter box nonsense), then why aren't you even a little upset at the grifters who lied to you about that topic? Same for the trans issues in this garbage "Tim comes home as Tammy" riff.

And the Mother Of All Bullshit that started me on this thought is the "beautiful perfect baby" live birth abortion story. If you genuinely have core beliefs that mean that story emotionally destroys you, why is there no follow-up?

This is genuinely a point that I have trouble figuring out about the MAGA phenomenon: How does a movement that is deeply motivated by anger show no signs of angry backlash? Take a walk with me:

rosie1972.bsky.social@rosie1972.bsky.social

But even in those rare cases where people own up and announce they are changing their votes, there's rarely the same anger that they displayed before they figured out that they had been snookered.

And this lack of anger gets more interesting when we look at the specific topics (like the one in the OP thread) and how angry those topics supposedly make his followers.

This is genuinely a point that I have trouble figuring out about the MAGA phenomenon: How does a movement that is deeply motivated by anger show no signs of angry backlash? Take a walk with me:

rosie1972.bsky.social@rosie1972.bsky.social

(Brief aside: The Fermi Paradox is the idea that the sheer number of stars and planets would seem to require that intelligent life has developed elsewhere, but we see no signs of it. No, this isn't a joke about MAGA intelligence, but I can't put that toothpaste back in the tube.)

It's been 11 years since he came down the escalator, and he wasn't exactly known as a model of honesty, integrity, and fidelity before that. So there simply must be many many cases of his followers suddenly figuring out his scam.

This is genuinely a point that I have trouble figuring out about the MAGA phenomenon: How does a movement that is deeply motivated by anger show no signs of angry backlash? Take a walk with me:

rosie1972.bsky.social@rosie1972.bsky.social

All of the points about how people fell into MAGA mindsets are well-established: media diet, education, various strains and degrees of bigotry, etc. But there's a Fermi Paradox built into the MAGA movement.

Tom Skerritt was the key piece in one of my favorite episodes of Cheers. "Let Sleeping Drakes Lie" is pure gold. Absolute nonsense of a premise: Norm is hired to paint the house of the rich guy Rebecca is crushing on. Skerritt is the only one NOT playing it over the top, and that's why it works.

Hey, this sure looks like the steady hand we definitely want to be deeply involved in American's national security infrastructure.

Brandon Friedman@brandonfriedman.bsky.social

Musk is the greatest threat to U.S. national security in at least 25 years

The primary driver of positive sentiment about AI is that the free versions occasionally deliver decent results. If it didn't cost me anything to noodle around for 45 minutes and eventually get an approximation of "good," it's a miracle! If I had to pay for every failure, I would hate it.

More Perfect Union@moreperfectunion.bsky.social

BREAKING: Anthropic reports an $80 billion net loss in the first half of 2026.

@goldengateblond.bsky.social

And this hatred gets supercharged when you look at the use cases where the engine is given a nested command (i.e., user creates a prompt that, in turn, rapidly generates and evaluates prompts). It's the infinite typewriter monkeys thought experiment, but you're paying for every keystroke.

BestGoShoeless reposted

shauna

it was the fuck-aroundest of times, it was the find-outest of times (gift link) www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

BestGoShoeless reposted

jeremy kaplowitz

@jeremykaplowitz.com

fuck i just realized my wife has never disavowed the muslim brotherhood

Wow! AI is so super duper amazing! Like, I just reported a user on TikTok that was spamming a literal wall of videos of closeups of spread vaginas, and I got a crazy fast response! In less than a minute, a noisy, wasteful data center politely informed me that everything was a-ok!

@bernybelvedere.bsky.social

And here's the best part, y'all! There is a non-zero chance that my use of the simple technical descriptors probably will influence the likelihood of *this* thread being seen by anyone.

BestGoShoeless reposted

Jill Twiss

@jilltwiss.bsky.social

i'm gonna go ahead and disavow all the brotherhoods now just in case it comes up

BestGoShoeless reposted

Berny Belvedere

These posts are only three hours apart

thehandbasket.co'Tommy' from viral El-Sayed video is former Sen. Hawley staffer with Christian nationalist tiesThomas Teepell is the son of a former long-time Bobby Jindal staffer who's close to Sean Feucht.

Come to think of it, I haven't heard Tommy denounce the evil ventriloquist dummy in Magic. Why do I think he should be required to do so, when I've never asked any of my close friends to do the same? Well, I don't know...but... Well, just look at him.

BestGoShoeless reposted

Marisa Kabas

@marisakabas.bsky.social

SCOOP: 'Tommy' from the now-viral exchange with Abdul El-Sayed is Thomas Teepell, a former staffer for Republican Senator Josh Hawley with close ties to Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht. He's the son of a former Bobby Jindal staffer whose consultant work was instrumental in getting Hawley elected.

BestGoShoeless reposted

John Scalzi

@scalzi.com

I see we're having a debate about whether it's okay to go back to "X," the site owned by a trillionaire fascist who is currently bankrolling the GOP's midterm, throttled Ukraine's war effort, and still winkingly allows vast amounts of CSAM on his service Answer: No, what the fuck is wrong with you

BestGoShoeless reposted

Chris Person

@papapishu.bsky.social

Octopus is the easiest thing to cut out of your diet on moral grounds because it’s basically never around, probably has dreams and emotions and tastes like a tire.

BestGoShoeless reposted

David Rothschild

@davmicrot.bsky.social

Tech leaders flocking to a platform owned/operated for white supremacy & deepfake child porn is not an incentive to go to that platform, but rather a warning about tech leaders.

BestGoShoeless reposted

Riker Googling

@rikergoogling.bsky.social

support group for people in love with deleted holograms

BestGoShoeless reposted

Mrs. Detective PikaBOO, Esq.

@clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Wow -- Hannity is moving in for the kill: "Why not just say 'I went to Pepperdine Law School and then took a different career path'? Why get into this long drawn-out thing about the difference between a lawyer and an attorney?"

I think I need to patent a new test for LLMs masquerading as AI: The Parenthood Test. I asked some different platforms to give me a family tree of the characters in the 1989 Steve Martin movie, Parenthood. (I was using it for a class and wanted to give the students a relationship cheat sheet.)

And here's the best part: You just know the dude is going to try again, and bring me some new reason that it's not actually wrong. IT'S NOT A CALCULATOR IF YOU HAVE TO CATCH IT ON A GOOD DAY.

So many of these guys (and they are almost invariably guys) just cannot accept that two things are true at the same time: 1) The tech represents an interesting breakthrough in natural language computing 2) It's unreliable as hell

So somebody challenged a comment section, "Give me two examples of AI getting it wrong" and I shared this example and another. He responded that Claude got it right and didn't understand the other example enough to try.

So I checked Claude again. Hurray! Dianne is not her own mother! But: 1) The baby born at the end is explicitly credited to Steve Martin's character. THAT'S HER BROTHER. EW. 2) It credits Rae Dawn Chong as being Cool's mother. I can't even find a single breadcrumb to explain that hallucination.

The first fails were somewhat forgivable. Not only is "Parenthood" a common title, but there was also the TV series. Once I coached the platforms to be specific, they did better, but not great.

The most common problem seems to be Dianne Wiest. NONE of the platforms could accurately establish her relationships in the film, with one of them presenting her as HER OWN MOTHER. (Oddly, even though I didn't ask, several told me she won an Oscar for the role; she was nominated but didn't win.)

@gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social

I award bonus points for a diss that they wouldn't understand, even if you explained it to them.

This post is unavailable.

BestGoShoeless reposted

James

This bad boy can fit so many nationalized space companies inside it you wouldn’t believe it

Is there some requirement printed somewhere that each new Press Secretary has to launch their first briefing by making objectively false claims about Trump's crowd sizes?